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Saturday, January 08, 2011

10 - The Origins of Writing in Western Civilization and the Kaulins Minoan Aegean Sign Concordance (MinAegCon™): A Syllabic Grid of Mycenaean Greek Linear B Script, the Cypriot Syllabary, the Phaistos Disk, two Old Elamite Scripts, the Inscription on the Axe of Arkalochori, and Comparable Signs from Sumerian Pictographs and Egyptian Hieroglyphs

"The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to publish TEI XML digital editions for Plutarch, Athenaeus, the Greek Anthology, Elegy and Iambus and for most of Lucian. This increases the available Plutarch from roughly 100,000 to the surviving 1,150,000 words. Athenaeus and the Greek Anthology are new within the Perseus Digital Library, with roughly 270,000 and 160,000 words of Greek. The 13,000 words for J.M. Edmonds Elegy and Iambus include both the surviving poetic quotations and major contexts in which these poems are quoted. The 200,000 words of Lucian represent roughly 70% of the surviving works attributed to that author. In all, this places more than 1.6 million words of Greek in circulation. With this release, we have also changed the license for opensource texts to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, removing the non-commercial restriction that we adopted in March 2006 when we first began making our XML source texts available under a CC license. See our post on the Stoa Consortium blog for full details on the release."

The above also includes the Greek Dictionary Headword Search Results, so that a search e.g. for the root of my surname Kaulins, entering "kaul" gives the following results, showing how this tool can be used for research:

Jacob Grimm on Linguistics

Jacob Grimm, wrote: "As a matter of general logic, I am an enemy of grammar; it gives the appearance of being strict and exclusive in its rules, although it actualy limits pure observation, which I regard to be the soul of linguistic research. He who pays no attention to the perceptual fruits of observation - which from the very start do mock all theories by the certainty of their existence - will never make heads or tails of the impenetrable essence of language."